Search the site

Guardian Angel

GUARDIAN ANGEL, My Story, My Britain, charts the journey of a journalist and writer who moved from darling of the left to champion of the moral high ground. This memoir of her personal and professional life
reflects the cultural changes in society over more than three decades.

The book is among the opening titles released by Melanie's new
publishing company, Melanie Phillips Electric Media. It can be purchased
from emBooks.com as well as from amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and iBooks.

Sanitising Hamas in the worship of power

During the recent war between Hamas and Israel, it became a
commonplace to hear people either promoting the idea of ‘engaging’ with Hamas (former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband, former UK
ambassador to the UN Sir
Jeremy Greenstock, journalist Jackson
Diehl and the Washington Post plus sundry EU diplomats and of course the
UN) on the basis that there could be no peace between Israel and the
Palestinians without it and Hamas was really quite moderate; or actually
providing a platform for Hamas itself (see the Guardian’s record here).
And of course, most of the media coverage of the war was based on the noxious premise
that there was a moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, regardless of
the fact that the latter is a proscribed terrorist organisation which seeks to achieve the extermination of Israel and every Jew.

This is what the
Hamas put up on the screen during a music video last week on its al Aqsa TV
station:

‘Killing Jews is worship that draws us close to Allah’.

Lyrics of songs on this video included these little
ditties:

‘[Oh] lovers of the trigger: Killing the occupiers
[Israelis] is worship that Allah made into law...’

‘Brigades - we kidnap soldiers, Brigades - we kill
Jews’

and

‘Repeat in the name of your Jihad: Death to Israel!’

These are the people whose ‘deployment of
longer-range rockets that have now been shown to reach Tel Aviv and Jerusalem’
is applauded by Seumas
Milne in the Guardian; who David Miliband said ‘we can no longer ignore’;
who Sir Jeremy Greenstock said have been, for the past four years, ‘mainly
passive and containing the militants in Gaza’; with whom the UN envoy to the Middle East has
‘maintained quiet contacts for years’; and who Jackson
Diehl hoped would work out with Israel ‘a modus vivendi that benefits
both sides’.

Such positions sound to me suspiciously like
sanitising, mainstreaming or even endorsing those who are committed to
genocide. Yet these positions are being promoted by politicians, diplomats and
establishment newspapers.

What this represents is at base (and leaving aside the
element of ideological fanaticism) a total eclipse of truth and morality by
power-worship. Hamas is dominant; therefore there can be no solution unless
Hamas is involved.

The commitment by Hamas to destroy Israel and
wipe out every Jew on earth is considered all but irrelevant. There can only
be a solution if Hamas is involved, goes this thinking, because it is in
power over the Palestinians – and there can only be a solution that is
brokered between Israel and the Palestinians.

The fact that Hamas/the Palestinians are in the
business of exterminating Israel cannot be allowed to interfere with the
unchallengeable dogma that peace between two warring sides can only be achieved
if they talk to each other. The idea of a ‘just war’ fought to defeat
genocidal terror is explicitly ruled out. Indeed, it has been said repeatedly
by the power-worshippers that no solution can be achieved through war (so much
for World War Two).

On the contrary, genocide can only be defeated
by war. To force its victims to negotiate with aggressors whose agenda of
extermination is non-negotiable (and we know that because they say so,
repeatedly) is tantamount to forcing those victims to surrender to their own annihilation.

That is the position with which all those who sanitise Hamas have now irredeemably associated themselves. They should not be
allowed to forget it.

Meanwhile, Khaled abu Toameh
suggests that Mahmoud Abbas may be about to enter into an alliance with Hamas. If that does happen, you might think that would make it difficult for
western leaders to keep up the pretence that the Holocaust-denier Abbas -- who
says he will never accept Israel as a Jewish state; who is committed to
unlimited Palestinian immigration to Israel to destroy it as a Jewish state;
whose regime promotes the inculcation of its children into murderous hatred of
Jews and Israel; whose flags and insignia obliterate Israel from the map; and
whose party’s military wing, the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, commits terrorist
atrocities against Israelis -- really is a moderate and a statesman-in-waiting.

If you did think it would make it difficult, you would
be wrong. For in the event of such a pact between Fatah and Hamas, western leaders
would undoubtedly conclude that Hamas was indeed moderate and a worthy interlocutor
for peace – just like they have convinced themselves that, despite overwhelming
evidence to the contrary, Fatah’s aim is a Palestinian state living peacefully
alongside Israel. After all, the alternative would be that there would be
no-one to negotiate with. And for our arrogant, ignorant, self-interested,
solipsistic western leaders, that would not only be unthinkable. It would be
simply impossible.

About Melanie

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist and author. She is best known
for her controversial column about political and social issues which
currently appears in the Daily Mail. Awarded the Orwell Prize for
journalism in 1996, she is the author of All Must Have Prizes, an
acclaimed study of Britain's educational and moral crisis, which
provoked the fury of educationists and the delight and relief of
parents.